All depends on what crowd you ran with I assume. If he went to college a few decades ago it’s more than possible that he DID know many atheists or agnostics, but they just weren’t wearing it on their sleeves or being vocal about it. I was pretty much an agnostic from college, and I never explicitly wore that label or told people I was, since I tended not to get into religious bull sessions during my college days, being more interested in sex, drugs and rock and roll (plus lots and lots of beer :p).
I generally give people the benefit of the doubt, especially when it doesn’t really matter whether he did or didn’t go to Berkeley…it’s his arguments that are flawed, regardless of where he comes from.
My own favorite example is sand dune ripples. Wind blows over sand: about as random as you could ask for. Yet what results are vast orderly fields of serried dunes, in long straight lines, evenly spaced, looking much as if a giant rake had been drawn through the sand. Japanese ornamental gardening on a very large scale!
My favorite example is market economies, millions of self-interested individuals achieving “a more efficient allocation of societal resources than any design could achieve.”(Hayek).
When was the last time that happened? Or was the annihilation of trillions of dollars of capital in 2008 your idea of efficient allocation of resources?
It was a market adjustment to a bubble, but that’s neither here nor there…why hijack the thread with this sort of bullshit? If you want to talk about the economy or market economic or whatever start a new thread.
He said it as an aside about order from chaos, not as a general hijack of the thread. If you think it’s a bad example of order from chaos then that would be a valid point in the discussion…your comment, however, was not as it had zero to do with the topic of the thread (I won’t get into that it shows you don’t understand Hayek enough to even comment as that too would be a hijack).
Now you have me hijacking the thread as well. :smack:
And instead invoke liberal dogma, ehe? Still, if you think it’s a bad example then that is relevant. Personally, I didn’t think it was a bad enough example to warrant all this side discussion, but whatever floats thy boat. As I said, myself I like the Fibonacci sequence as a mental example of order from chaos. Der Trihs’ tornado is another good one, as is the simple Newtonian precision of planetary mechanics or Trinopus’ ripples in a sand dune. There are lots of examples of order arising from chaos, so the point would be again to contend with the OP wrt whatever s/he meant by ‘random nature’ (still no idea) or why because of the randomness of life arising on this planet we should have some sort of residual randomness in our nature…or something.
Ok. I’ll be brief and simple; this is a needless tangent.
The chaos is vast numbers of individuals with needs and wants.
The order is that information (supply, demand, risk, trends, everything) being aggregated into prices, pursuant to voluntary exchanges that satisfy the needs and wants of both parties. These prices contain more information than an individual could possibly accrue, yet arise spontaneously.
Examples of sand dunes, tornadoes, and the Fibonacci sequence are all fine. But it should be noted that humans are part of nature, and exhibit spontaneous order as well: market economies, the Internet, common law.
My favourite example is Chesil Beach. An 18-mile long bank of billions of shingle rocks, which the waves have contrived to organise in strict order of size - at the northwestern end, it’s pea shingle - as you move toward the other end, the stones gradually increase in size until you get to the southeastern end, where they are large cobbles.
(The effect is so consistent than people could apparently work out their position on the beach just by looking at the size of the stones, even if they landed there in fog).
Markets and economics are no longer a sub-topic in this thread. If it is an important topic in its own right, then it deserves its own thread; take it there.
Several examples of chaos moving to order without an “outside hand” have been provided.
OK if we just concentrate on the first and last sentences?
Why don’t we call intuition, extrapolation and guesswork part of creative thinking,
but remind ourselves that sound creative thinking is grounded in observation.
You know, we see an apple fall, and in a few years we are able to calculate the orbits
of celestial bodies to a high degree of accuracy. Then after additional insight and
observation cumlinating in 1919 we are able to refine the original insight to the extent
that we know exactly how to remote pilot a vehicle through a bullseye of about one km
radius in the vicinity of the planet Neptune. Repeat- we know exactly how to do so.
So as far as I can tell all that everything (we) know is wrong stuff is stupid and it is bullshit.